I wish we could be as forward thinking as the Japanese and realize that while nuclear power may not be perfect, the chance of a disaster is outweighed by the benefits. The Fukushima incident was horrible, but it's not likely to ever happen again.

When you ask this type of question, please specify what kind of waste you're talking about. Because waste is not just fuel. Since you didn't specify fuel, I'll simply say that the sealed bags of OREX waiting for processing aren't real bothered by earthquakes.

http://www.simplyinfo.org/?p=3101"The misinformation on thorium is highly promoted by the nuclear industry and various companies that want investment dollars for thorium reactors and fuel. This fairy tale being told about thorium is far from accurate and realistic. The problem becomes worse as uninformed people hear a brief propaganda piece on thorium and pass on that information without any research of their own.

One myth is that thorium is safe. Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 billion years (billions, not millions). Thorium-232 is also highly radiotoxic, with the same amount of radioactivity of uranium and thorium, thorium produces a far higher dose in the body. If someone inhaled an amount of thorium the bone surface dose is 200 times higher than if they inhaled the same amount of uranium. Thorium also requires longer spent fuel storage than uranium. With the daughter products of thorium like technetium‐99 with a half life of over 200,000 years, thorium is not safe nor a solution to spent fuel storage issues.

Thorium is unable to produce energy on its own. Something thorium cheerleaders frequently fail to mention is that it needs a fissile material like uranium-235 or plutonium-239 to operate the reactor. Uranium-235 and plutonium-239 are both considered bomb making materials and a proliferation risk. So now all the "safety" of thorium has been trumped by the need for weapons grade material to operate the reactor. The work involved to enrich the uranium-235 used in a thorium reactor to the percentage needed for a bomb is not a difficult process. The reprocessing cycle does not resolve the proliferation risk."

"Last year, new wind power plants with a total capacity of some 40 gigawatts (GW) were installed worldwide, according to the World Wind Energy Association (WWEA). This puts wind energy's global capacity at 237 GW by the end of 2011- the equivalent of what some 280 nuclear power plants generate. Currently, there are some 380 nuclear power plants producing electricity worldwide.Four times more wind power by 2020"

I hope they took the downtime to fix the few design flaws they discovered from the tsunami.

1. Don't keep the emergency generator control circuitry in the basement where it could flood.2. Don't design your response procedures with a maximum earthquake level of 7, even if that's the worst you've seen.3. Build your robots to clean up the mess before you need them. (Very unJapanise!)4. Put in mechanical ways to disable reactor that do not require power.5. Godzilla!

minarke:I hope they took the downtime to fix the few design flaws they discovered from the tsunami.

1. Don't keep the emergency generator control circuitry in the basement where it could flood.2. Don't design your response procedures with a maximum earthquake level of 7, even if that's the worst you've seen.3. Build your robots to clean up the mess before you need them. (Very unJapanise!)4. Put in mechanical ways to disable reactor that do not require power.5. Godzilla!

To their credit, wasn't that facility in the process of being shut down for major upgrading? It's a 1960s plant as I remember it. Though I could be wrong. Too lazy to go check it now.

TuteTibiImperes:the lord god: Good. Now if only we could start building new ones here.

+1.

I wish we could be as forward thinking as the Japanese and realize that while nuclear power may not be perfect, the chance of a disaster is outweighed by the benefits. The Fukushima incident was horrible, but it's not likely to ever happen again.

"The misinformation on thorium is highly promoted by the nuclear industry and various companies that want investment dollars for thorium reactors and fuel. This fairy tale being told about thorium is far from accurate and realistic. The problem becomes worse as uninformed people hear a brief propaganda piece on thorium and pass on that information without any research of their own.

One myth is that thorium is safe. Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 billion years (billions, not millions). Thorium-232 is also highly radiotoxic, with the same amount of radioactivity of uranium and thorium, thorium produces a far higher dose in the body. If someone inhaled an amount of thorium the bone surface dose is 200 times higher than if they inhaled the same amount of uranium. Thorium also requires longer spent fuel storage than uranium. With the daughter products of thorium like technetium‐99 with a half life of over 200,000 years, thorium is not safe nor a solution to spent fuel storage issues.

Thorium is unable to produce energy on its own. Something thorium cheerleaders frequently fail to mention is that it needs a fissile material like uranium-235 or plutonium-239 to operate the reactor. Uranium-235 and plutonium-239 are both considered bomb making materials and a proliferation risk. So now all the "safety" of thorium has been trumped by the need for weapons grade material to operate the reactor. The work involved to enrich the uranium-235 used in a thorium reactor to the percentage needed for a bomb is not a difficult process. The reprocessing cycle does not resolve the proliferation risk."

Yes and errrr NO. Part of the thorium fuel cycle is to take that waste Thorium-232 and use a breeder reactor to turn it back into Uranium-233 which in turn is used as the initiator for a new Thorium reactor. You see the " needs a fissile material like uranium-235 or plutonium-239 " part of a thorium reactor is only in the initial start-up stages of the reactor, after the reactor has achieved stable high temperature fission it burns only Thorium. By recycling its main waist produce back into usable energy the cycle creates a positive feedback where the more thorium reactors you have the cheaper the most expensive part cycle becomes.

Mandate rooftop solar panels on all new residential buildings, and begin programs to encourage solar panels on existing homes. It wouldn't solve the problem but it would make an impact towards keeping the maximum of nuclear plants off for good.

Convert garbage incinerators to generating plants, so you kill 2 birds with one stone. Each city in Japan has one, so it could be a convenient solution. They could even use the waste heat to heat people's homes in winter, in areas like north Honshu and Hokkaido. Or at least the waste heat could be used industrially.

Biogas generation on farms is cheap and easy, it's done in Africa all the time... It could be done at sewage treatment plants easily. Biogas is renewable, and the byproduct is a rich compost that could be used as fertilizer.

Windmills... More efficient appliances... The list goes on. A little at a time and Japan or any country could be free of fossil/ nuclear fuels.

And yes, Thorium plants would be a nuclear option that would be safer, given the reaction stops dead when you remove the neutron source.

See, here's the thing. Nuclear waste, as most think of it, isn't really waste. It's fuel that has been converted into other elements by the fission process. Over time, these elements build up in the fuel and they halt the nuclear reaction.

It is possible, and is done by most nuclear nations, to recycle that fuel by separating out the elements that halt the reaction. Then you put the cleaned fuel back into a reactor. And those other elements separated out often have useful properties in industry and medicine. So what you're left to dispose of is very, very small.

Now a good question is why doesn't the US reprocess its fuel? And the answer is dumb and mostly political rather than technical. Back in the 70s, the reprocessing steps could result in weaponizable plutonium, so Carter wanted to 'lead by example' and ban nuclear reprocessing. This was very shortsighted as nobody else followed along and it left the US with tons of spent fuel sitting in pools. Meanwhile, reprocessing methods were advanced that no longer posed proliferation risks. Yet we still don't have reprocessing plants.

Ikahoshi:Mandate rooftop solar panels on all new residential buildings, and begin programs to encourage solar panels on existing homes. It wouldn't solve the problem but it would make an impact towards keeping the maximum of nuclear plants off for good.

Convert garbage incinerators to generating plants, so you kill 2 birds with one stone. Each city in Japan has one, so it could be a convenient solution. They could even use the waste heat to heat people's homes in winter, in areas like north Honshu and Hokkaido. Or at least the waste heat could be used industrially.

Biogas generation on farms is cheap and easy, it's done in Africa all the time... It could be done at sewage treatment plants easily. Biogas is renewable, and the byproduct is a rich compost that could be used as fertilizer.

Windmills... More efficient appliances... The list goes on. A little at a time and Japan or any country could be free of fossil/ nuclear fuels.

And yes, Thorium plants would be a nuclear option that would be safer, given the reaction stops dead when you remove the neutron source.

The big thing is going to be better electricity storage technologies, ie big batteries we can plug into the grid. This is something that will help in a lot of ways, not only as far as making solar more workable, but also by helping the reliability of the power grid by evening out demand. Molten salt batteries are interesting.

Even normal rooftop solar is good, though, as it still reduces the load on the grid. It'll be interesting to see what happens with concentrated solar thermal, too.

"The misinformation on thorium is highly promoted by the nuclear industry and various companies that want investment dollars for thorium reactors and fuel. This fairy tale being told about thorium is far from accurate and realistic. The problem becomes worse as uninformed people hear a brief propaganda piece on thorium and pass on that information without any research of their own.

One myth is that thorium is safe. Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 billion years (billions, not millions). Thorium-232 is also highly radiotoxic, with the same amount of radioactivity of uranium and thorium, thorium produces a far higher dose in the body. If someone inhaled an amount of thorium the bone surface dose is 200 times higher than if they inhaled the same amount of uranium. Thorium also requires longer spent fuel storage than uranium. With the daughter products of thorium like technetium‐99 with a half life of over 200,000 years, thorium is not safe nor a solution to spent fuel storage issues.

Thorium is unable to produce energy on its own. Something thorium cheerleaders frequently fail to mention is that it needs a fissile material like uranium-235 or plutonium-239 to operate the reactor. Uranium-235 and plutonium-239 are both considered bomb making materials and a proliferation risk. So now all the "safety" of thorium has been trumped by the need for weapons grade material to operate the reactor. The work involved to enrich the uranium-235 used in a thorium reactor to the percentage needed for a bomb is not a difficult process. The reprocessing cycle does not resolve the proliferation risk."

Do you intentionally pick biased sites which have their misinformation and poor research debunked in the comments section, or do you really just want to make our lives easier to point out just how wrong you are?

linuxpyro:It'll be interesting to see what happens with concentrated solar thermal, too.

I read something about the ones using parabolic mirrors focused onto Stirling Engines, seems like a great idea. You are right though in that any wind or solar power will only be as effective as our means to store that energy when the sun isn't shining or wind isn't blowing, and our ability to transport that power to areas where it isn't practical to set up the arrays or windmills.

jacla:TuteTibiImperes: the lord god: Good. Now if only we could start building new ones here.

+1.

I wish we could be as forward thinking as the Japanese and realize that while nuclear power may not be perfect, the chance of a disaster is outweighed by the benefits. The Fukushima incident was horrible, but it's not likely to ever happen again.

We wish, but if this report is true..."The cooling system of the spent-fuel pool in reactor 4 at the Fukushima No. 1 plant automatically suspended operations Saturday and the water temperature is starting to rise, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said."

Step 1: Build 66,522 7.5 MW Wind TurbinesStep 2. Send electricity from Wind Turbines to electrolyze 30,000,000 gallons (US) of water into Hydrogen and Oxygen each hour.Step 3: Store Hydrogen and Oxygen in storage tanks, until neededStep 4: Burn Hydrogen and Oxygen in currenty available efficient natural gas turbines to generate electricity for the grid.Step 5: Distribute power through existing grid in current conventional wayStep 6: Collect Hot Steam and condense back into water, while benefitting from further thermal transfer of energy.Step 7: Recycle water back into Electrolysis chamber.Step 8. Goto Step 2

This would power the United States 100% for 2008 levels of electrical production (4.378 TerraKw Hours) i.e. Petawatt/hoursSupplement with Solar and wave power to increase production of storable Hydrogen and Oxygen in case of peak time demand and or future needs.

Stop wasting time/money military defense and other risks involving other negative externalities inherent from Nuclear, Oil, Natural Gas and other minable/extractable resources for electrical power ever again.

Let's make, making power so simple that even humanity can do it in a way that we can't screw it up.Oh sure, there could and will be explosive hydrogen/oxygen accidents, but it won't be any worse than when the natural gas storage faciltity explodes or a refinery catches on fire, except the only byproduct after the initial explosion will be water and not all of that hazardous carbon residue or unspent fuel to clean up.

"The misinformation on thorium is highly promoted by the nuclear industry and various companies that want investment dollars for thorium reactors and fuel. This fairy tale being told about thorium is far from accurate and realistic. The problem becomes worse as uninformed people hear a brief propaganda piece on thorium and pass on that information without any research of their own.

One myth is that thorium is safe. Thorium-232 has a half life of 14 billion years (billions, not millions). Thorium-232 is also highly radiotoxic, with the same amount of radioactivity of uranium and thorium, thorium produces a far higher dose in the body. If someone inhaled an amount of thorium the bone surface dose is 200 times higher than if they inhaled the same amount of uranium. Thorium also requires longer spent fuel storage than uranium. With the daughter products of thorium like technetium‐99 with a half life of over 200,000 years, thorium is not safe nor a solution to spent fuel storage issues.

Thorium is unable to produce energy on its own. Something thorium cheerleaders frequently fail to mention is that it needs a fissile material like uranium-235 or plutonium-239 to operate the reactor. Uranium-235 and plutonium-239 are both considered bomb making materials and a proliferation risk. So now all the "safety" of thorium has been trumped by the need for weapons grade material to operate the reactor. The work involved to enrich the uranium-235 used in a thorium reactor to the percentage needed for a bomb is not a difficult process. The reprocessing cycle does not resolve the proliferation risk."

Do you intentionally pick biased sites which have their misinformation and poor research debunked in the comments section, or do you really just want to make our lives easier to point out just how wrong you are?

/The comment about bomb-making materials is especially hilarious.

Not that hilarious. A genuine by-product of the thorium fuel cycle is a not insignificant amount of Americium if a LFTR reactor was configured specially. It can be used to make a bomb "Theoretically". No one has ever make one and its by far the hardest way to make a fission device but it is a small risk.

I think we can both agree were at a point now where it's better just to be honest and tell people the actual faults about nuclear power rather than have them just make up random stuff.

B) Chernobyl is irrelevant to my argument. It was more than 20 years ago. It was one event. Like I said before, pebble bed reactors are passively safe; the type of disaster that happened at Chernobyl is impossible using a pebble bed.

C) Fossil fuels do more to increase cancer rates world-wide than Chernobyl could ever dream of.

Wanna guess which of these pictures is of a still-burning coal fire in Pennsylvania, and which is near Chernobyl? Incidentally, the Centralia fire started 24 years BEFORE Chernobyl blew up:

I don't understand the reaction to Fukushima. This was ultimately a good story that touts the safety measures of nuclear energy. There was an accident, and the containment measures did precisely what they were designed to do, and NOT A SINGLE PERSON WAS INJURED OR KILLED. NOT ONE. The fact that all of this happened is, if anything, an argument for nuclear energy, especially considering that coal energy actually does kill several miners each year in accidents, plus tens of thousands via air pollution. People are morons that can't see deaths unless they are concentrated into a single event to make the news. If one person dies in a car crash every day for 100 days, this is somehow not as bad as 40 people dying all at once in a train accident.